The Wicked Boy by Kate Summerscale Page B

them to working-class lads who had been taught to read in the state-funded board schools set up over the previous two decades. An Act of Parliament of 1870 had given local authorities the power to enforce school attendance, and successive Acts made elementary education compulsory (in 1880) and then free (in 1891). Between 1870 and 1885, the number of children at elementary school trebled, and by 1892 four and a half million children were being educated in the board schools. The new wave of literate boys sought out penny fiction as a diversion from the rote-learning and drill of the school curriculum, and then from the repetitive tasks of the mechanised industries to which many of them progressed. Since cheap magazines were traded on street corners, in playgrounds and factory yards, each issue could have many readers. Penny fiction was Britain’s first taste of mass-produced popular culture for the young, and was often held responsible for the decay of literature and of morality.
    The bloods sold for a halfpenny, a penny or tuppence, depending on the length of the story, while proper novels for boys  – whether
Robinson Crusoe
or
The Prisoner of Zenda
, the romances of Walter Scott or the adventures of Jules Verne – cost two or three shillings each. Most of Robert’s novelettes were sixty-four-page pamphlets priced at tuppence, their titles picked out in scarlet and yellow on vividly illustrated covers. At eight and a half inches tall and six inches wide, they were small enough to slip inside a jacket pocket, or between the leaves of a textbook or a prayerbook. They were sold by newsagents, tobacconists, confectioners and chandlers.
    A week after Robert and Nattie’s arrest, a
St James’s Gazette
journalist was assigned to analyse the contents of every cheap boys’ weekly that he could lay his hands on. He read thirty-six different titles, some of which he said had a circulation of more than 300,000, and he reported on the results over several issues of the newspaper. The task was ‘repulsive and depressing’, he said; the writing ‘brutalised my whole consciousness’, reviving ‘the fundamental instinct of savagery inherent in us all. It disgusts, but it attracts; as one reads on the disgust lessens and the attraction increases.’ The Coombes boys, he concluded, ‘with their intelligence scientifically developed at the expense of the ratepayers, had been wound up to regard murder as a highly superior kind of “lark” by a sedulous study of the worst kind of gory fiction and cut-throat newspaper’.
    In fact, most of the books in Robert’s collection, though slapdash and hackneyed in style, were not particularly gory. Earlier in the century, penny pamphlets had contained monstrous, Gothic tales – they were dubbed ‘dreadfuls’ because they elicited terror – but they now consisted chiefly of detective mysteries, Westerns, futuristic fantasies, tales of pirates, highwaymen, hunters and explorers. The adventure yarns were strikingly manly productions, heavily influenced by Henry Rider Haggard’s
King Solomon’s Mines
(1885), whose hero boasts that ‘there is not a petticoat in the whole history’, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
(1883), which according to Arthur Conan Doyle marked the beginning of the ‘modern masculine novel’.
    Many of the stories that Robert read were English re-issues of New York dime novels , among them the Jack Wright submarine tale; the Buffalo Bill adventure; a fable about the medieval crusades; and a mystery featuring Joe Phoenix, a hard-boiled Manhattan detective with an astonishing capacity for impersonation and disguise. These stories had their share of alluring women (with full, red lips, lithe figures, bright golden hair floating behind them) and of exciting violence. The brave warrior in
The Secret of Castle Coucy ; or, a Legend of the Great Crusade
leaps